vaguely familiar in a distant sort of way, the name was familiar in a far more vivid, in-your-face kind of fashion.
He knew only one Kara, God help him.
That would be the only daughter of his mother’s oldest friend, Paulette Calhoun. Every single memory associated with Kara Calhoun was fraught with either embarrassment or frustrated annoyance—or both. He didn’t even try to remember one good moment spent in her company. There weren’t any.
Back when he was a little boy, his parents and hers would get together frequently. All the summer vacation memories of his childhood had Kara in them. Kara and turmoil. He’d been rather shy and introverted. Two years younger, Kara had been the exact opposite, as wild as a hurricane, and just as fearless. He’d felt inadequate.
And then mercifully, just before he turned thirteen, his father’s company began moving him, and thus them, from location to location. They traversed the Northwest and then the Southwest. Changing addresses so frequently made it hard for him to make any friends, but the upside was that at least during the rest of the year, he didn’t have to spend time confined in some remote summerhouse with the wild tomboy, counting the hours until September and the beginning of school.
If, after all these years, this gorgeous woman really was Kara Calhoun, then God, he couldn’t help thinking, had a very macabre and somewhat sadistic sense of humor.
Despite the pressures generated by an incredibly hectic morning stapled to the makings of an equally insane afternoon, Dave stopped what he was doing and waved his next patient into the first open room.
“Be right there, Mr. Mendoza,” he promised.
Then, instead of following the man, Dave rounded the reception desk and walked toward the sexy-looking blonde with the long legs.
That just couldn’t be Kara.
Still, why would she say she was if she wasn’t? He wasn’t going to have any peace until he found out for certain one way or the other, so, warily, he asked, “Kara?”
“Yes,” she cried with the same sort of feeling a contestant might display when their partner finally guessed the right answer after being supplied with countless clues.
He still couldn’t get himself to believe it. Why, after all these years, would she suddenly appear here, in a place where she was clearly out of her element? Her shoes alone looked as if they might equal a week’s salary for one of his patients—the ones who actually had a job.
“Kara Calhoun,” he said, trying to reconcile the image of a bratty, skinny girl with pigtails and a nasty sense of humor with the clearly gorgeous young woman who was standing in the packed waiting room. Obviously nature could work miracles.
Why all the drama? Kara wondered. The Dave she remembered had been a super-brainy geek. Had he been forced to trade in his brains for looks? Was that how it worked?
“Want to see my driver’s license?” she offered, wondering what it would take to convince this man who she was.
The touch of sarcasm in her voice was all he needed to convince him. “It’s you, all right. Still have the sunny disposition of an armadillo, I see.”
She stretched her lips back in an obviously forced smile. “You’ve filled out since I last saw you.” Which, she added silently, was putting it mildly. If the way his lab coat fit was any indication, the man now had muscles instead of arms that could have doubled for toothpicks. “Too bad your personality didn’t want to keep up.”
He would have liked nothing better than to turn his back on her and walk away, but she hadn’t just appeared here like some directionally challenged genie out of a bottle. There was a reason Kara had sought him out after all these years and he had just enough curiosity to wonder why.
He made it simple for her. He asked. “What are you doing here?”
“I was wondering the same thing myself,” she cracked. But then, as he apparently lost patience and began to turn on his heel to walk away, she relented. There was no point in coming all the way over here and not giving him the game. “I brought you a copy of the latest version of ‘The Kalico Kid’ video game. Your mother told mine that your cousin’s little boy’s birthday is coming up and he’s dying to get his hands on one.”
If this were anyone else, he would have expressed his gratitude, paid for the game and taken it. But this was Kara, and the ordinary rules didn’t apply here. His memory was crowded with a host of different sneaky tricks that a gangly ten-year-old played on his trusting twelve-year-old body. Spending summers trapped in her company had taught him to hold everything she was involved in suspect.
His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. Motioning her closer to create at least a semblance of privacy, he asked, “What’s the catch?”
“Catch?” Boy, talk about not being trusting. But then, looking back, maybe she couldn’t quite blame him. She had been pretty hard on Dave when they were kids. “The catch is you have to spin a room full of straw into gold by morning.”
“You can do that?” a small voice directly behind her piped up. Despite the distance, her voice had carried enough so that the only child in the room heard, and he was clearly awestruck.
Kara turned around to see a little boy of about eight or ten. He looked rather small and fragile, so he might have even been older. She couldn’t tell for sure. But she did know that he had the widest smile she’d ever seen.
He also, she noted, had an extremely pale complexion and, despite the fact that it was unseasonably hot outside, he was wearing a bright blue wool cap pulled down low on his head. She suspected that the boy’s mother, sitting behind him, had put it on him to keep people from staring. The stigma of a bald head on one so young was difficult to cope with.
“She was making a joke, Gary,” Dave told the boy. “She does that kind of thing.”
Or did, he added silently. The truth was that he had no way of knowing what Kara was like these days, but he suspected she was still true to form—even if her outer form had turned out incredibly well.
He got back to business. “How much do I owe you for ‘The Kalico Kid’ game?”
But Kara was no longer paying attention to him. Her attention was now completely focused on the little boy. Even if he hadn’t been the only child in the room, he would have stood out because of his near-ghostly pallor.
“You really have ‘The Kalico Kid’ game?” Gary asked. She would have had to be blind not to notice the wistful gleam that came into his brown eyes.
She smiled at him, blocking out everyone else, especially Dave. “Yes, I do.”
Reaching into her shapeless, oversize purse, Kara felt around until she located what she was looking for. Instead of the boxed game she’d brought for Dave, she pulled out a handheld gaming system that had become all but standard issue for every bored kid sitting in the backseat of his or her parents’ car, forced to endure yet another cross-country family vacation.
She guessed by the way the little boy’s eyes lit up that not only did he not have a copy of the new version—only a few had hit the stores—but he didn’t have a handheld set, either.
“Want to play the game?” she offered, holding the gaming system out to him.
“Can I?” he breathed almost reverently. His smile was the closest to beatific she’d ever seen.
She had to restrain herself from hugging the boy. Hugging was something she did when she became emotional. Instead, she nodded and choked out the word “Sure.”
“Gary, you’d better not,” his mother chided. The woman looked as worn-out as her son. “I don’t want to risk having him break it. I can’t afford to replace it,” she explained.
Her eyes went from the boy to his mother. There was no way she was going to separate Gary from the gaming system. That hadn’t been her intent when she’d handed